In recent years, there has been a surge of development and releases of new types of mobile devices made available to the public. Today's consumer is often equipped with a smart phone, tablet, MP3 player or other device that can be used to access the internet, download and view digital media (e.g. video and audio files), and perform a wide variety of other functions. Given such large numbers of devices and device types, it is quickly becoming a non-trivial task to make media content available to all of the consumers across their various devices. In fact, many companies are spending large fractions of their time and resources managing, scaling and maintaining media processing systems that may have nothing to do with their core business. These companies are looking for encoding systems and services that can provide the best video/audio quality to consumers at a low cost. Because digital video (and audio) content is often delivered to multiple device types over unmanaged networks with fluctuating bandwidth, it is desirable to utilize transcoding to produce a version of each asset to accommodate these variants.
Many content providers and distributors are continually serving new content to users. For example, news sites, entertainment studios, television content producers are continuously producing new media content that must be transcoded into a variety of different formats. For these content providers, it is desirable to transcode the media in an optimal way to reach the most of their customers in the minimal amount of time, while saving on the potentially substantial costs incurred for transcoding the media assets. In many cases, simple first-in, first-out (FIFO) scheduling of transcoding jobs across all of the available media is not be the most optimal or efficient technique to be utilized.